It’s 40 years since Vivienne Westwood staged her first runway show to, as she put it, “destroy the word ‘conformity’.” She added: “It’s the only reason I’m in fashion.” At a time when we are craving the atmosphere and theatricality of physical fashion shows more than ever, Thames & Hudson is taking us on a trip back in time to every Vivienne Westwood show there’s ever been with a sumptuous new book, Vivienne Westwood Catwalk: The Complete Collections.

With an introduction and collection of texts by fashion journalist Alexander Fury, and biographies written by both Westwood and her husband and longtime collaborator Andreas Kronthaler, Vogue got an exclusive peek inside the tome, which is out 24 June 2021.

Here, we go back in time to 1981 to Westwood’s first catwalk collection, Pirates, with its swashbuckler boots, squiggle prints and fall-down stockings — pioneering fashion’s neo-romantic movement — complete with a text from the book by Fury.

Pirate

Vivienne Westwood’s catwalk debut came late in her career. By 1981, aged 40, she had been designing for a decade, creating clothes to fill the ever-transforming King’s Road, London, boutique she ran in partnership with [Sex Pistols manager and then-boyfriend] Malcolm McLaren. Westwood, however, reasons that this show — retrospectively dubbed Pirate, although that name did not appear on the invitations — was the actual beginning of her career as a fashion designer.

The show chimed with a reinvention of the boutique as Worlds End, inspired by pirates (its logo, a cutlass-brandishing arm, was the flag of 17th-century English privateer-turned-pirate Thomas Tew), allied with McLaren and Westwood’s underlying theme of plundering history and cultures worldwide for inspiration.

With no experience of a formal fashion show, Westwood allowed the mostly non-professional models to choose their own outfits. Looks mixed together menswear and womenswear, as Westwood would do on her catwalks for the next 15 years. Makeup artist Yvonne Gold, who worked on Westwood’s first eight shows, covered the models’ teeth with gold foil from cigarette packets — an idea inspired by stylist Caroline Baker. The colour gold was important: it linked to the idea of plunder.